Get Rich. Save the World. Gut Fish

Venture capitalist Ross Baird, 32, has red hair and an open face that calls to mind Happy Days-era Ron Howard. He’s one of those preternaturally mature millennials who already has a developed philosophy, glossy academic credentials, and financial backing from important people for his fund, Village Capital. In high school at Phillips Exeter Academy, Mark Zuckerberg was the dormitory proctor who set up his e-mail. Plus, Baird wants to save the world while getting rich. All very Silicon Valley.

But the rule of Sand Hill Road (that’s shorthand for the Menlo Park, Calif., epicenter of tech VC) is to invest widely in nouvelle concepts, hoping that one will be at least a “ten-bagger” (posting a return 10 times the investment). Baird, however, typically invests in unsexy ideas that he hopes will be three-baggers, often in agriculture, energy, and health care. Venture capitalists fixated on finding the next Snapchat put 85 percent of their $50 billion in funding last year into states that voted for Hillary Clinton, most of it in California, Massachusetts, and New York. Meanwhile, for the past seven years, Baird has been doggedly finding and developing successful businesses in the downtrodden places whose economic distress ultimately helped elect Donald Trump.